Omelas Seminar Reflection

I had a lot of reactions to this seminar because there were so many different types of ideas that made sense to me and I liked and agreed with most of them. A lot of them had to do with finding happiness and how when you have happiness you have to have suffering. I was and am still a little confused on this matter because realistically, yes that does make sense to me but do we really need suffering to find happiness? It makes sense in most ways because without suffering, how do we really know what happiness is? In the end, I think you do need a little bit of suffering to find happiness. A lot of the time it’s not we who are suffering, its others who are suffering for your benefit and we have been raised so that this is ok and we don’t know any other way. In this story, the majority of Omelas seems to understand that it is ok and that their life depends on this child’s misery. In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, paragraph 9,” Ursula states, “Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” I’m not sure how this works out, but if another thing we discussed is true, which is this being a metaphor for our world I can see how this young child relates to the third world countries. In third world countries, the suffering of the people is how we get our clothing, our jewelry, our chocolate, etc. and without them, we wouldn’t know what to do. Another topic mentioned in our Seminar but I disagreed to was that the people of Omelas should just take turns being the suffering child. This was said because then you would feel better about yourself because you would know that people are happy because of your suffering and you can switch off. This didn’t make any sense to me though, because your not solving anything, your just creating a huge circle that takes turns suffering and being happy. Why not try to find a way to have happiness but base it off your own suffering, not the suffering of others?


When I try connecting this short story to anything, I always think of blood diamond because it has a lot to do with benefitting off the suffering of others and that is what this story is about. The people working in Africa, not being treated very fairly represent the child in the room with no windows. While the people that get to wear the diamonds are only the people who can afford them and don’t have to worry about where they got them from are the people of Omelas. This comes up a lot though with sweatshops in India, China and many third world countries. That’s only half of the bad part though, the other half is that we don’t know better. This is how we were raised and yes, some people are aware of it but not enough are aware or even care enough to change anything about it.



Why does the author think we can't describe happiness in our society (line 37)?

When Ursula says that we can’t describe happiness in our society I almost agree with her because a lot of our happiness is based off of what society tells us to be happy with, not with what is true happiness. Do we really know what true happiness is though? Have we been so influenced with other peoples ideas of happiness that we don’t know our own idea of being happy? In this story, the author talks about the people of society being very happy, almost too happy to convince anybody. In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, paragraph 3,” Ursula says, “ For instance how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.” When she says that happiness is based on what is necessary is where it ties into our society because so many things in our society are not necessary but we think they are. All the advertisements look so good, therefore it makes us want them and makes us feel like if we don’t have them we are ‘suffering.’ We don’t really know what happiness is because we wouldn’t be able to describe it without including a device that makes us feel joy and not just describing inner happiness.

• How is this town that sounds so amazing based off of the suffering of this one child?
• How do they choose this child? What is it based on?
• Is it useless to try to solve a problem, even if you know nothing will help or be solved?
If you are trying to solve a problem you should know at the beginning if it’s going to cause suffering in the end or not. A lot of depression, anxiety and irritation we put ourselves through by seeing suffering as unfavorable, is something to be avoided at all costs. In the end though, it is kind of useless. Think about how much trouble it causes. You should try to look at things knowing whether it’s going to cause suffering or not and should be able to tell close to the beginning. If we can do something to solve a problem, then there is no need to worry or be unhappy about it; if we can’t, then it doesn’t help to worry or be unhappy about it either. As long as we don’t get anxious or irritated, then our mind will enable us to bear the hardest of sufferings easily. But, if we are dominated by anxiety, even the smallest problem becomes extremely hard to cope with.